I feel like I have found a lone voice of sanity in a jungle of brainless fanpeople sucking up the snake oil and pretending LLMs are AI. A simple control loop is closer to AI than a stochastic parrot, as you correctly put it.
LLMs are AI. There’s a common misconception about what ‘AI’ actually means. Many people equate AI with the advanced, human-like intelligence depicted in sci-fi - like HAL 9000, JARVIS, Ava, Mother, Samantha, Skynet, and GERTY. These systems represent a type of AI called AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), designed to perform a wide range of tasks and demonstrate a form of general intelligence similar to humans.
However, AI itself doesn’t imply general intelligence. Even something as simple as a chess-playing robot qualifies as AI. Although it’s a narrow AI, excelling in just one task, it still fits within the AI category. So, AI is a very broad term that covers everything from highly specialized systems to the type of advanced, adaptable intelligence that we often imagine. Think of it like the term ‘plants,’ which includes everything from grass to towering redwoods - each different, but all fitting within the same category.
Bubble sort is just a basic set of steps for sorting numbers - it doesn’t make choices or adapt. A chess engine, on the other hand, looks at different possible moves, evaluates which one is best, and adjusts based on the opponent’s play. It actively searches through options and makes decisions, while bubble sort just follows the same repetitive process no matter what. That’s a huge difference.
I feel like I have found a lone voice of sanity in a jungle of brainless fanpeople sucking up the snake oil and pretending LLMs are AI. A simple control loop is closer to AI than a stochastic parrot, as you correctly put it.
LLMs are AI. There’s a common misconception about what ‘AI’ actually means. Many people equate AI with the advanced, human-like intelligence depicted in sci-fi - like HAL 9000, JARVIS, Ava, Mother, Samantha, Skynet, and GERTY. These systems represent a type of AI called AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), designed to perform a wide range of tasks and demonstrate a form of general intelligence similar to humans.
However, AI itself doesn’t imply general intelligence. Even something as simple as a chess-playing robot qualifies as AI. Although it’s a narrow AI, excelling in just one task, it still fits within the AI category. So, AI is a very broad term that covers everything from highly specialized systems to the type of advanced, adaptable intelligence that we often imagine. Think of it like the term ‘plants,’ which includes everything from grass to towering redwoods - each different, but all fitting within the same category.
If a basic chess engine is AI then bubble sort is too
It’s not. Bubble sort is a purely deterministic algorithm with no learning or intelligence involved.
Many chess engines run on deterministic algos as well
Bubble sort is just a basic set of steps for sorting numbers - it doesn’t make choices or adapt. A chess engine, on the other hand, looks at different possible moves, evaluates which one is best, and adjusts based on the opponent’s play. It actively searches through options and makes decisions, while bubble sort just follows the same repetitive process no matter what. That’s a huge difference.
Your argument can be reduced to saying that if the algorithm is comprised of many steps, it is AI, and if not, it isn’t.
A chess engine decides nothing. It understands nothing. It’s just an algorithm.